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My research focuses on cultural figurations of energy and oceans in an era of escalating climate change and uneven energy transition. Living in Newfoundland and Labrador, a Canadian province with entrenched ambitions to expand its offshore petroleum industry while also pursuing hydro and wind projects, provides both context and motivation for my work.

After the Rig

I’m currently working on a monograph titled After the Rig: Remaking Offshore Infrastructural Aesthetics. The project examines representations of the post-extractive fates of offshore rigs from the North Sea to the South China Sea. After the Rig sheds light on the potential social, cultural and ecological changes which can emerge in the wake of offshore oil, as well as the forms of thinking and expression that block transformation. Funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight grant, After the Rig is in close conversation with the fields of energy and environmental humanities.

Cold Water Oil

What happens offshore matters. Currently, over a quarter of the world’s oil and gas is produced from beneath the seas. (Routledge 2022) illuminates ignored histories, influential contemporary narratives, and emerging energy and environmental futures. The volume centres on North Atlantic and Arctic regions and the continuing but often strongly contested pursuit of oil and gas in frigid, tumultuous, and environmentally sensitive seas.

Danine Farquharson and I have collaborated on a number of petrocultural projects, including an essay in (edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger) and co-hosting the third international Petrocultures conference. which we co-edited for Routledge's Environmental Humanities series, is the most recent.

Oil Media on the Grand Banks

My recent essay “Oil Media on the Grand Banks: Hibernia as Platform” is included in  (Routledge 2026). The chapter centres on two massive, gravity-based, extractive platforms located on the long ecologically compromised Grand Banks: Hibernia (first oil 1997) and Hebron (first oil 2017). Frequently at the heart of efforts to promote the oil industry's technological prowess, they have something approaching iconic status. After considering figurations of Hibernia and Hebron in museum exhibits and corporate advertising campaigns, the essay shifts to address the significance of the rigs not just in media but as media.

Offshore Human Habitats

“Dwelling at Sea: Offshore Human Habitats” in the (Routledge 2026), assesses historical and contemporary plans for human-constructed infrastructure intended for people to dwell in offshore marine locations for extended periods. I argue that fully realized projects and speculative projections for offshore habitats—artificial islands, extractive production platforms, military installations, and research stations—offer insight into the competing political, social, and economic motivations and desires of the cultures that produce them, and into what is at stake for both humans and the more-than-human world in a context of climate change.

Archiving the Offshore

One of the largest publicly accessible archives about Newfoundland and Labrador’s oil industry pertains to the Ocean Ranger disaster. I’ve drawn on it in a number of contexts in my research, most notably in “.” In this article in the Journal of Canadian Studies, I study photographs taken by David Boutcher, Lance Butler, and Lloyd Major. All three were employed on the Ranger and Boutcher died when the rig capsized. I argue the men’s images resituate, and on occasions challenge, tropes that predominate in corporate-sponsored photography, including those related to the opportunities afforded by oil.

After Oil

I was part of a collective of 35 researchers and artists who gathered in Edmonton, Alberta for the first After Oil School. We discussed the culture and politics of energy transition and, over the course of less than a week, drafted . Our book was subsequently published by West Virginia University Press.

Energy Amphitheatre

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I collaborated with Rachel Jekanowski, Danine Farquharson, and Dean Bavington on a research-creation project tracing some of the everyday ways in which energy shapes the town in which we dwell, St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Have a look at the  we created, and read  to the project on the Network in Canadian History and Environment's website.